Renato Sanches and the Risks of Going Too Fast

As a teenager, he was the breakout star of the last European Championship. Five years later, he is still waiting to build on that promise.

For a couple of months, no more, the fee seemed steep. A few weeks before the start of the last European Championship, in 2016, Bayern Munich agreed to a deal with Benfica to sign the latest prodigy from the Portuguese team’s apparently never-ending production line: an 18-year-old midfielder with only nine months of senior experience on his résumé. If it was something of a coup for Bayern — Manchester United and several other members of Europe’s elite had been interested, too — it was a resounding success for Benfica. Bayern, the perennial German champion, was committed to paying a basic fee of $41 million, with $53 million more due if certain performance targets were met. All told, it amounted to the most valuable sale of a player in Portuguese history, which was not bad, given that the teenager, Renato Sanches, had started the season on the club’s reserve team.